Take a Lesson from the Queen – Beyonce’s new album release

Beyonce’s new album release stuns the marketing and business world and solidifies the POWER of social media as the new way to get out a message. That’s right, Beyonce released her new album with just one sentence, “Guess what, Beyonce has a new album.” The album has is already number one on iTunes and is climbing up the Billboard charts. According to Bloomberg Businessweek, Beyonce said she was bored with the old model of album releases and she wanted to do something that spoke directly to her fans. Well, in doing so Beyonce has proven to the world that social media is the new media and it has become a powerful and dominate way to speak to an audience.

This speaks directly to what I have been saying for the past couple of years and what I will continue to say to small business owners, which is that you need to “build your audience” and you need to do that using social media, which has changed the game. Social media is a game-changer that is NOT going away anytime soon. And while you may not have a Beyonce level of fame, you can still build an audience of hundreds of thousands, even millions of people who love you for what you do and frankly even more so for what you have to say and for the level of quality content that you bring to the marketplace.

Beyonce’s new album marketing delivered on her own terms

Another fascinating thing about the way Beyonce released her new album was the marketing and how it was delivered on her own terms. She forced her raving fans to buy the entire album for $15.99, because the singles weren’t released until a later date. She released only 30 second previews of every video. Her album sales will far exceed the 1 million mark, and she will pick up more once the singles are dropped, so you do the math. It’s pure genius.

So what can a small business owner learn from this. Well, it’s pretty simple and it’s like I’ve always said, social media has created a medium in which the average person can achieve above average results. All you have to do is build an audience and create a presence online in your niche. Once you create that audience your job then becomes to cultivate the audience by creating quality content that is not only useful, but is ‘shareable.’ Having content that is shareable is key because your audience will begin to grow on a viral and organic basis. Doing this not only positions you as a leader, but also an expert on your topic. But here is where the real benefit comes in and why what Beyonce did was genius. She cut out the middleman. I mean really, why spend millions of dollars on an ad campaign when you can simply send a tweet or write a one sentence post? By doing what B did she saved millions of dollars. You can save money too, buy marketing and promoting to your own audience the same way she did. Let me give you an example of this:

Say you’re a writer and you want to write a romance novel. So you build a Facebook fan page for romance lovers and you begin to post all types of things about romance books and your fan page grows to over 100,000. Then you write and publish your book and put out a post saying it’s available to your audience and you sell 1,000 books in one day! Wouldn’t you say that this is a powerful concept? Well, trust me this is happening everyday on social media, why not make it happen for you and your business.

To learn more about this powerful concept, pick up a copy of my course, the Ultimate Facebook Mastery course. You won’t regret that you did.

Toni Coleman-Brown

Toni Coleman Brown is an author, coach, motivational speaker, social media strategist and professional networker. She is also the Founder of the popular, Network for Women in Business, which is an online community designed to train, connect and advance women in business.